Product Design with Brainstorming, with Emily Haidemenos (A Chat with Cross Functional Experts) Artwork

Quality during Design

Quality during Design is the podcast for engineers and product developers navigating the messy front end of product development. Each episode gives you practical quality and reliability tools you can use during the design phase — so your team catches problems early, avoids costly rework, and ships products people can depend on.

You'll hear solo episodes on early-stage clarity, risk-based decision-making, and quality thinking, along with conversations with cross-functional experts in the series A Chat with Cross-Functional Experts.

If you want to design products people love for less time, less cost, and a whole lot fewer headaches — this is your place.

Hosted by Dianna Deeney, consultant, coach, and author of Pierce the Design Fog. Subscribe on Substack for monthly guides, templates, and Q&A.

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Quality during Design

Product Design with Brainstorming, with Emily Haidemenos (A Chat with Cross Functional Experts)

January 11, 2023 • Dianna Deeney • Season 3 • Episode 3

0:00 | 36:27

This episode is part of our interview series, “A Chat with Cross Functional Experts". Our focus is speaking with people that are typically part of a cross-functional team for new product development. We discuss their viewpoints and perspectives regarding new products, the values they bring to new product development, and how they're involved and work with product design engineering teammates.

Emily Haidemenos joins us to talk about brainstorming for product development. She hosted a workshop at a conference about this topic titled, "Brainstorming: The Solution to Structured Problem Solving”. We welcome her to the show to share some of her insights and stories of success.

Emily has a Master's Degree in Design and Manufacturing Engineering from the University of Massachusetts Lowell. After initially working as a Design Engineer Emily left and moved into a New Product Development Quality Engineering position. In this role, she worked with multiple cross-functional engineering teams to ensure the effectiveness of quality systems while earning her Six Sigma Black Belt certification. Now as a Chief Engineer for next generation high voltage automotive products, she aims to grow and develop a team of technically competent individuals who realize their maximum potential.

We talk about:

Common pitfalls of brainstorming from a perspective of taking defensive action against those pitfalls.
We go over the basic steps of brainstorming, but then circle back to the planning phase. There’s a lot we can do in the planning phases, and Emily shares specifics about planning for brainstorming so we can get the most out of it, including setting up those defenses.
Best practices for leading a brainstorming session.
Successes she’s had with it, and what her team thinks about it.

Visit the podcast blog for links to Emily's recommendations.

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ABOUT DIANNA
Dianna Deeney is a quality advocate for product development with over 25 years of experience in manufacturing. She is president of Deeney Enterprises, LLC, which helps organizations and people improve engineering design.